Harrowing, previously unseen images from 1938’s Kristallnacht pogrom against German and Austrian Jews have surfaced in a photograph collection donated to Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial, the organisation said on Wednesday.
One shows a crowd of smiling, well-dressed middle-aged German men and women standing casually as a Nazi officer smashes a storefront window. In another, brownshirts carry heaps of Jewish books, presumably for burning. Another image shows a Nazi officer splashing petrol on the pews of a synagogue before it is set alight.
Yad Vashem, a Holocaust memorial centre, released the photographs on the 84th anniversary of Kristallnacht, also known as the Night of Broken Glass. Mobs of Germans and Austrians attacked, looted and burned Jewish shops and homes, destroyed 1,400 synagogues, killed 92 Jews and sent another 30,000 to concentration camps. » | Associated Press | Wednesday, November 9, 2022
